racketboy.com

It's a beautiful, beautiful game.

I suggest grinding a bit at the game's beginning. The first few bosses are arguably the hardest,

And most every time you find a new town the armor will be better than what you already possess.

Have fun!

Ziggy587 wrote:Anyway, I fired up Secret of Mana the other day, and I'm actually a few hours into it now. I might have read a few things about it that helped the gameplay click with me more this time around. So it's sort of like a Zelda, but more RPG-like.

Yeah, I don't like calling it an RPG. Many will say ARPG, but really it's a Zelda-like with upgradeable stats and equipment. Which isn't bad at all, and when I first played it right after LttP, it blew my mind. LttP was a solid upgrade from the original LoZ, but SoM felt like a new level completely.

I'm liking the artwork so far, and I'm liking the music even more. The music is constantly getting stuck in my head when I shut the game off.

SoM's OST was one of the few that I consistently listened to outside of gameplay. For that style, it's the best you can get.

There's a few things that are annoying me. Like a few times, I had enemies absolutely stun lock me to death.

Save often! It's easy to do so. A lot of getting out of that will be playing around with the stats of your secondary characters. It can be tricky at first, but after a while something will click and then will basically never happen again.

Secret of Mana is a really beautiful game. My brother recently played through it with is seven-year-old daughter. Sometimes he would play it alone to grind the player stats and make it easier for her.

I would like to do the same with my children, but can't really coordinate it. We use their screen time to do other things that we have to get done, so I actually spend very little time playing video games with my own children. My son also regularly has meltdowns over games, so they are often in timeout. Both Wii-motes are in time-out right now after he got frustrated with Super Mario Galaxy.

I have either owned or had access to Chrono Trigger for over 20 years and have still never played it.

Despite all the praise it gets, I did not particularly enjoy Super Castlevania IV. I played it in the nineties and didn't finish it. It sounded great, but I did not like the art style. I think I had already at least seen Super Metroid by the time I first played it, so the graphical effects everyone praised seemed lackluster. I was also disappointed that it was so linear, as I was expecting something closer to Simon's Quest. I have since played through the original NES trilogy, though, and now plan to eventually revisit it.

I mentioned my complaints about Star Fox earlier.

I think it's strange that the SNES got a port of Paperboy. It's awful, but I don't even like the arcade version of Paperboy. Who likes this game?

And why did they release a Frogger port on the SNES and Genesis in 1998? Of course the answer is money, but who would pay full price to play Frogger on an SNES in 1998?

My SNES collection is much smaller than my NES collection, so I can't think of any guilty pleasures or games I love that aren't generally well-regarded on that system like I can the NES.

Ziggy587 wrote:Anyway, I fired up Secret of Mana the other day, and I'm actually a few hours into it now. I might have read a few things about it that helped the gameplay click with me more this time around. So it's sort of like a Zelda, but more RPG-like. I'm liking the artwork so far, and I'm liking the music even more. The music is constantly getting stuck in my head when I shut the game off.

Love Secret of Mana! I didn't play this until the winter of 2017, when I bought myself the SNES Classic. However, I got hooked on the game and played it a lot for the following few weeks. The gameplay really clicked with me, and I loved the graphics and music. I discovered this game during a rough time for my family, and it really gave me an escape and distraction from what was going on at the time. Anyway, it's definitely become one of my favorite games on the console. I was able to score a cheap cart in early 2020, so I'm looking forward to revisiting it one day on actual hardware. Enjoy it!

o.pwuaioc wrote:I love the Super Nintendo and genuinely don't get the hate for it. While I may have been more into Genesis in the early 90s, by the mid 90s, I was solidly into the Super Nintendo and all its games. It also grew up with me. In the early days, I was exclusively an action kid. Super Mario World was the first game I really aced back and front. But I also loved Super Castlevania IV, Link to the Past, Mega Man X (shout-out to Nintendo Power with that silver cover), Contra III, and I'm sure a bunch of mid-tier games that I don't always remember.

That Nintendo Power silver cover for the Mega Man X issue looked awesome. It's memorable and really stands out to this day, IMO. I have a box of Nintendo Powers from my childhood and while some issues have gone missing over time, luckily I still have that one. The other SNES related cover I like is the issue for Illusion of Gaia, which featured a warrior holding a sword looking back at a pyramid and a night sky in the background. Always thought that was a cool illustration.

Note wrote:That Nintendo Power silver cover for the Mega Man X issue looked awesome. It's memorable and really stands out to this day, IMO. I have a box of Nintendo Powers from my childhood and while some issues have gone missing over time, luckily I still have that one. The other SNES related cover I like is the issue for Illusion of Gaia, which featured a warrior holding a sword looking back at a pyramid and a night sky in the background. Always thought that was a cool illustration.

They definitely had a unique angle to their covers, at least for the first couple of years. The weird claymation or live action scenes I thought even back then were hit or miss. I think I appreciated the style of the Zelda comics more than the Zelda II cover, but I do appreciate what they were trying to do.

Pretty cool you kept your NP mags! I only wish I had. Instead I had to rebuild them over the years, but never got close to re-getting those early ones. Bitd I had them all until about 1995 or so. Honestly, it's the only magazine I wanted to re-buy. I only wish Sega had put out something comparable, since I remember Sega Visions being pretty awful.

o.pwuaioc wrote:Yeah, I don't like calling it an RPG. Many will say ARPG, but really it's a Zelda-like with upgradeable stats and equipment. Which isn't bad at all, and when I first played it right after LttP, it blew my mind. LttP was a solid upgrade from the original LoZ, but SoM felt like a new level completely.

So you must really hate when people call Zelda an RPG.

Limewater wrote:I have either owned or had access to Chrono Trigger for over 20 years and have still never played it.

That actually makes me feel better!

Limewater wrote:And why did they release a Frogger port on the SNES and Genesis in 1998? Of course the answer is money, but who would pay full price to play Frogger on an SNES in 1998?

Weren't those Majesco releases? I guess Majesco got the rights to re-release Frogger, and so they did. Majesco carts were very cheaply made, so it was probably just a cash cow thing for them.

Note wrote:Love Secret of Mana! I didn't play this until the winter of 2017, when I bought myself the SNES Classic. However, I got hooked on the game and played it a lot for the following few weeks. The gameplay really clicked with me, and I loved the graphics and music. I discovered this game during a rough time for my family, and it really gave me an escape and distraction from what was going on at the time. Anyway, it's definitely become one of my favorite games on the console. I was able to score a cheap cart in early 2020, so I'm looking forward to revisiting it one day on actual hardware. Enjoy it!

I have a similar story. I had owned Yoshi's Island for a number of years, but never really got into it. Then when I got the SNES Classic, I ended up playing Yoshi's Island to completion and really enjoying it. I was going through a tough time, and playing Yoshi's Island on the SNES Classic was a way for me to try and rid my stress at the end of the day. An escape and distraction, just like you said.

After beating the game, I was a little annoyed that my completed save file was on the Classic and not my actual SNES cart. But I was able to transfer the save from the Classic over to my cart. I could do the same for you with your Secret of Mana cart, if you want. PM me if interested.

Note wrote:That Nintendo Power silver cover for the Mega Man X issue looked awesome. It's memorable and really stands out to this day, IMO. I have a box of Nintendo Powers from my childhood and while some issues have gone missing over time, luckily I still have that one. The other SNES related cover I like is the issue for Illusion of Gaia, which featured a warrior holding a sword looking back at a pyramid and a night sky in the background. Always thought that was a cool illustration.

o.pwuaioc wrote:Pretty cool you kept your NP mags! I only wish I had. Instead I had to rebuild them over the years, but never got close to re-getting those early ones. Bitd I had them all until about 1995 or so. Honestly, it's the only magazine I wanted to re-buy. I only wish Sega had put out something comparable, since I remember Sega Visions being pretty awful.

Damn, I wish I still had all of my old gaming mags. I didn't have many Nintendo Power back in the 90s, but my brother and I use to pickup GamePro all the time. Unfortunately, I don't think I have any of my GamePro magazines, aside from a few snipped pages that I saved. I do, however, have just a few Nintendo Power magazines. Two of them though are missing the front/back covers, which really annoys me. But I do have that Illusion of Gaia issue with the cover!

I kind of wish Nintendo would put the entire Nintendo Power collection into volumes. If they republished them as hardcover volumes, people would pay big money for that. They could additionally or alternatively re-release them in digital form. I would love to get them!

I do have a ton of Nintendo Power magazines from the Wii era, never really looked at them much though.




Speaking of Illusion of Gaia... This was a game I never heard of back in the 90's. After starting to read message boards about old games, I learned that it was a popular title. And it was dirt cheap at the time, so I picked up a copy in the early 2000's. I played maybe an hour or two with it and then for whatever reason stopped playing. I haven't touched it since, but I've been meaning to give it another go for some time now.

A thought just occurred to me... I suppose I shouldn't feel too bad about not yet playing some essential SNES RPGs because I've played a few fan translated ones. I would wager that most SNES fans haven't played fan translations.



Final Fantasy V -



Star Ocean -


Has anyone played any fan translated SNES games? Especially any RPGs?

Ziggy, aren't my copies of FFV and Seiken Densetsu 3 your work? I thought I remember you being the one to do those for me years back. I long wanted a copy of FFIV JP translated into English and playable on a Super Nintendo, but I eventually just decided that FFIV on the GBA sufficed.

Definitely. Star Ocean and Final Fantasy V are two RPGs that immediately come to mind, but there are many others I enjoyed and consider worth checking out: Bahamut Lagoon, Front Mission, Tales of Phantasia, Live A Live, and Magic Knights Rayearth were all ones I grabbed up eagerly, alongside Terranigma. Not a fan translation on that one, but still worth looking into.

There are many I never got to play though, such as Energy Breaker. Does anyone know if the Record of Lodoss War translation was ever completed?

o.pwuaioc wrote:Ziggy, aren't my copies of FFV and Seiken Densetsu 3 your work? I thought I remember you being the one to do those for me years back. I long wanted a copy of FFIV JP translated into English and playable on a Super Nintendo, but I eventually just decided that FFIV on the GBA sufficed.

To be honest, I can't remember. But probably, yes. I did so many of them for Racketboy members, and it was so long ago now that it's kind of a blur now. But if you had someone from THIS forum do them, then it was almost certainly me.

I gotta say though, I had a ton of fun making those carts. And it got me to discover so many SNES games that I probably wouldn't have otherwise. I can remember how it started, too. Someone posted a thread about an absurd price for a Star Fox 2 repro, and the fact that someone made one in the first place was just magic to me. But then SnowKitty was like, "Yeah, it's just a Stunt Race FX cart with an EPROM swapped in." LOL.

So I looked into it, and completely went down a rabbit hole. It was right at the time I was reading into Star Ocean, too, so it all sort of gelled together for me. The forum was a LOT more active back then, and when I said I would try and make some for myself, there was a huge reaction of people inquiring if I could make them some as well. I was getting a shit ton of PMs about it, so eventually I made a thread to sort of journal my repro making experience. That thread blew up, and probably is what caused me to get even more PMs. So for a while, I was making carts left and right. It was great because I was doing something I enjoyed as a hobby (tinkering with electronics) and it was supporting yet another hobby (playing video games) and to be honest it really helped me out at times when I was making meager income LOL.

But after a while, it just got ridiculous. I would get name dropped in other forums, and this site is always a top Google result, so I was often getting people signing up just to PM about about making them carts. I didn't mine making them for forum regulars, and at first I didn't mine making it for random internet people. But it eventually became too much. And some of the random people would get me to make a cart and then disappear when it was ready (I never liked to take money up front, and it would take 1-2 weeks usually to get it made). Which sucked because I had invested time and money into making it, then I was left with some cart that I had to try and sell. Usually the popular ones weren't hard to get rid of, like FF5 and Seiken Densetsu 3. But sometimes it was a more obscure game and it would take a while to find someone to buy it from me. So after awhile, I decided to try and become more low key. But that thread I made was still pulling in Google hits. Eventually I went through all my posts in that thread and edited out certain buzz words. Then eventually the PMs stopped coming in.

To be honest, I miss making those carts. For any forum regular (read: a regular contributing member of this forum) here I would have no problem doing it. And I only say that because I know this forum's traffic is a lot slower these days, and the regular posters are a lot less than what it use to be, so that would mean request would be infrequent (more likely once in a blue moon).

Anyways...

/tripdownmemoryroad

Ack wrote:Live A Live

I can definitely remember making that one for you! Do you still have it? One day I'll get around to playing that one.

Tales of Phantasia is definitely on my list of fan-translated SNES games I'd like to play. Treasure Hunter G is another, thinking about repros just made me remember that one.